Category: Radioactive

A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran

Radioactive Religion Of Submission 15 Comments

Obama’s not anti-nuke.

The United States and its negotiating partners agreed “in secret” to allow Iran to evade some restrictions in last year’s landmark nuclear agreement in order to meet the deadline for it to start getting relief from economic sanctions, according to a report reviewed by Reuters.
The report is to be published on Thursday by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said the think tank’s president David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and co-author of the report. It is based on information provided by several officials of governments involved in the negotiations, who Albright declined to identify.
Reuters could not independently verify the report’s assertions.
“The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran,” Albright said.
Among the exemptions were two that allowed Iran to exceed the deal’s limits on how much low-enriched uranium (LEU) it can keep in its nuclear facilities, the report said. LEU can be purified into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium.

He’s on the other side.

Not An Iranian Sleeper Agent

Operation Empty Chair Radioactive Religion Of Submission 19 Comments

NOOOnonononono……

In his new book, “The Iran Wars,” Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran’s green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support.
Solomon reports that Obama ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters. “The Agency has contingency plans for supporting democratic uprisings anywhere in the world. This includes providing dissidents with communications, money, and in extreme cases even arms,” Solomon writes. “But in this case the White House ordered it to stand down.”

Just Between Friends

Forward! Radioactive Terrorism The One 20 Comments

WSJ;

The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.
Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

Via Big Red Headline Drudge.

A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran

Radioactive Religion Of Submission 15 Comments

The White House and its supporters were set on two goals, one of them trivial, the other terrifying. The trivial objective was to give a failed presidency at least one foreign policy legacy item. That was to be expected, since the Obama administration, in permanent campaign mode since the day the president took office, has presided over the worst American foreign policy in the modern era.
The more stomach-churning objective is that the administration, as it turned out, really believed in its pledges to get America out of the Middle East, and decided early on that the only way to do this was to replace the United States in the region with a duumvirate of Russia and Iran. Here, the JCPOA was part of a huge gamble to transform the region, with nuclear weapons the secondary rather than primary issue. That’s why J Street and others were involved: they were far less concerned with notional Iranian nuclear weapons than they were with advancing President Obama’s Middle East legacy–without having to admit what it was.
[…]
It makes no difference if this or that provision of the deal is ironclad, because the White House never had an intention of enforcing any of it. The JCPOA wasn’t a deal to stop a nuclear weapon, it was part of a plan to further a foreign policy agenda with which very few Americans would agree if it were stated to them clearly and unequivocally.
For those of us who thought the Iran deal didn’t pass the sniff test from the start, it is bitter consolation that all this is coming out now. Sometimes being right isn’t much of a comfort, and this is one of those times. But there’s a far more damaging problem in all this: not only has the United States burned a lot of its credibility in this farce, but so have a fair number of journalists and experts.

Read it all.

A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran

Media Operation Empty Chair Radioactive 18 Comments

Michael Totten;

I spent more than a decade interviewing people all over the world, sometimes on the phone and via email, but most of the time in person on the other side of the world. I’ve interviewed every type of person imaginable, from military commanders and heads of state to war refugees and homeless people who sleep outside in slums.
Trust me on this: government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That’s true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They’re often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.
It has never even occurred to me to an interview a government official in one country about what’s happening in another country.
There are exceptions. Occasionally I’ve been delighted by government officials in the most unlikely places, including in Cairo. In general, though, they’re the least interesting and the least reliable.
The last person you should be talking to, in other words, is Ben Rhodes.

A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran

Radioactive Terrorism 20 Comments

So smart, they can’t help bragging about it – Obama’s Foreign Policy Guru Boasts of How the Administration Lied to Sell the Iran Deal

Samuels’s profile is an amazing piece of writing about the Holden Caulfield of American foreign policy. He’s a sentimental adolescent with literary talent (Rhodes published one short story before his mother’s connections won him a job in the world of foreign policy), and high self regard, who thinks that everyone else is a phony. Those readers who found Jeffrey Goldberg’s picture of Obama in his March Atlantic profile refreshing for the president’s willingness to insult American allies publicly will be similarly cheered here by Rhodes’s boast of deceiving American citizens, lawmakers, and allies over the Iran deal. Conversely, those who believe Obama risked American interests to take a cheap shot at allies from the pedestal of the Oval Office will be appalled to see Rhodes dancing in the end zone to celebrate the well-packaged misdirections and even lies–what Rhodes and others call a “narrative”–that won Obama his signature foreign policy initiative.
[…]
In Rhodes’s “narrative” about the Iran deal, negotiations started when the ostensibly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president, providing an opening for the administration to reach out in friendship. In reality, as Samuels gets administration officials to admit, negotiations began when “hardliner” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still president. It was Rhodes who framed the Iran deal as a choice between peace and war, and it was Rhodes who set up a messaging unit to sell the deal that created an “echo chamber” in the press. “[Al Monitor reporter] Laura Rozen was my RSS feed,” says Tanya Somanader, the 31-year-old who managed @TheIranDeal twitter feed. “She would just find everything and retweet it.”

Take a gravol before you tackle this one.

A Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb For Iran

I Miss W. Radioactive Terrorism 38 Comments

Michael Ledeen;

Just last week, for example, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Commander Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said Iran is preparing for all-out war with the U.S. and its allies, and has vowed Iran will continue advancing and testing its ballistic missile program.
Speaking at a gathering of senior IRGC commanders in Tehran Tuesday, Jafari declared that the U.S, “would not be able to do a damned thing” in the face of Iranian advances, according to the official Tasnim News Agency.
This echoed an earlier speech by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who, in response to Washington’s latest plea for new talks about the ongoing Iranian ballistic missile tests, coldly said: “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.”
[…]
Those who laugh off Iranian braggadocio might wish to rethink their light-heartedness. All indications are that Tehran is deadly serious, and has been all along.

“On Friday, the authorities stripped security badges from several workers “

Operation Empty Chair Radioactive Terrorism 21 Comments

New York Times;

The investigation into this week’s deadly attacks in Brussels has prompted worries that the Islamic State is seeking to attack, infiltrate or sabotage nuclear installations or obtain nuclear or radioactive material. This is especially worrying in a country with a history of security lapses at its nuclear facilities, a weak intelligence apparatus and a deeply rooted terrorist network.

Related.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Radioactive Y2Kyoto 18 Comments

Germany Will Need 1,000 Wind Turbines To Replace This Workhorse Nuke Plant:

Replacing Grohnde will not likely come from gas generation since so much gas generation is being intentionally lost. Instead, it will likely come from building several thousand new wind turbines at a cost of at least $12 billion, not including back-up capacity which is likely to come from brown coal.
European utilities have been calling for capacity payments to avoid shutdown of too much thermal generation and causing an upheaval in grid reliability and energy security, but proposals for a capacity market were rejected just last year in 2015. According to Germany’s Bundesverband der Energie- und Wasserwirtschaft, more than half of Germany’s planned power plants are at risk because of government policies on renewables.
So even though Grohnde is the little reactor that could, its life will be cut short before it reaches its peak. And only for political reasons, not even the arbitrary economic pressure that is closing the new gas plants.
On the other hand, Germany has lots of brown coal, and is buying electricity from surrounding nations at elevated prices when it needs grid stability.
So not to worry.

If only Germany could do something to make their natural-gas plants more profitable.

North Korea’s Nuclear Missile Threat

Radioactive 12 Comments

Gatestone Institute:

The mainstream media and their stable of “experts” consistently underestimate North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapon capabilities. The gap between how the media report on the North Korean nuclear missile threat and the reality of the threat has become so wide as to be dangerous.
In the aftermath of North Korea’s latest nuclear test on January 6, 2016, for instance, and its launch of a mock satellite on February 7, 2016, the American people were told that North Korea has not miniaturized a nuclear warhead for delivery by missile nor could the missile strike the U.S. with any accuracy.
Mirren Gidda, for example, writing in Newsweek, inexplicably claims “International experts doubt that North Korea has manufactured nuclear weapons small enough to fit on a missile.”
Yet this commonplace assertion that North Korea does not have nuclear-armed missiles is simply untrue.

h/t Adrian

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